Towards Building a Forensics Aware Language for Secure Logging


Shams Zawoad, Marjan Mernik, Ragib Hasan




Trustworthy system logs and application logs are crucial for digital forensics. Researchers have proposed different security mechanisms to ensure the integrity and confidentiality of logs. However, applying current secure logging schemes on heterogeneous formats of logs is tedious. Here, we propose Forensics Aware Language (FAL), a domain-specific language (DSL) through which we can apply a secure logging mechanism on any format of logs. Using FAL, we can define log structure, which represents the format of logs and ensures the security properties of a chosen secure logging scheme. This log structure can later be used by FAL to serve two purposes: it can be used to store system logs securely and it will help application developers for secure application logging by generating the required source code.